>Despite the flaws of the RCPD, I do kinda feel like when it comes to >Korra's debut, they weren't really being overly fascist.

Fuck 'em. It's like nobody in that show understands whose name is in the title. Tiresome. :)

>Oh, it's a Psi Corps classification? >>I also did not know that. I thought it was a generic 'yeah, this >person is psionically active in some way; Customs and >Immigration guy looking at this, you may want to advise them on what >the local laws are like with regard to that sort of thing, so that >both the person and polity in question can come to a comfortable >understanding' thing.

That's the basic intent, but it uses the P-scale as its baseline - not as any kind of endorsement of the agency, obviously, but because its classification system is well-known and fairly intuitive. It could, perhaps, be taken as read that the phrase in Mike Zant's internal monologue is a simplification of a fairly complicated set of parameters, if one were the type to take things as read.

>>>It's like critiquing brushstroke work on a >>>painting; right and wrong don't enter into it as much as aesthetics >>>do. >>>>... who the fuck does that? >>... a lot of people? >>You seem to think that it's weird in some way. How so? (...)>I'm not sure how looking at a painting and saying "I see what they >were trying to do, I think, but the brushwork on the background is >rubbish for that; they should have done it different" is meaningfully >different from watching, say, an episode of Legend of Korra and saying >"I get what the writers were aiming for but they fucked it up."

Critiquing brushwork isn't like critiquing writing, it's like critiquing orthography. "Well, I see what Chaucer was trying to do, but fuck me, the man dyd lyke to use a y, dydn't he."

>Sometimes you seem to use "I just can't win" and equivalents in a fun, >tongue-in-cheek way, and sometimes you seem to use it in a legitimate >what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you-people way. And I legit have a >hard time telling them apart on occasion.

Well, in neither of those scenarios does "win" actually mean "be victorious in a contest", rather a more general sense of "obtain a positive outcome". Context! It's what separates us from the apes. :)

>>Well, deconstruction gives me a sharp pain,>>You've said this before, and I still consider it to be ironic >considering that one of the major bedrock pillars of the setting is >Revolutionary Girl Utena with a side of Magic Knights >Rayearth. :) >>The former is less a deconstruction than it is completely rendering >the conventions and assumption of shoujo anime down to their component >atoms, and the latter pulls some Evangelion-style "this starts off >highly conventional and then takes some weird left turns" action.

Yes, and in both (in fact, thinking about it, all three) cases you'll note that the local reaction here can be summed up as, "Well, that got unpleasant in hurry. Let's imagine for a moment what that would've been like if the people who made it hadn't turned out to be just fucking with us."